Professor Christopher Rapley

Professor Christopher Rapley CBE, M.A., Ph.D., D.Sc

Professor Chris Rapley CBE is Professor of Climate Science at University College London. He is a Fellow of St Edmund’s College Cambridge, a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a member of the Academia Europaea, a Board member of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, Chairman of the European Space Agency Director General’s High Level Science Policy Advisory Committee, and Chairman of the London Climate Change Partnership.

His previous posts include Director of the Science Museum London, Director of the British Antarctic Survey, and Executive Director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Before that Prof Rapley established and built up the Earth Observation satellite group at UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory. His research was in the fields of observational space astronomy and Earth remote sensing from space.

Throughout his career Professor Rapley has been active in the international leadership of science, for example as a member of the Board of the European Science Foundation, President of the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research, and as Chair of the international planning group for the International Polar Year 2007-2008.

His current interests are in the communication of climate science. With the playwright Duncan Macmillan he wrote and performed the acclaimed play ‘2071 – The world we’ll leave our grandchildren’, recently published as a book.

Prof Rapley was awarded the 2008 Edinburgh Science Medal for having made ‘a significant contribution to the understanding and wellbeing of humanity’. He was made a Commander of the British Empire in 2003.